Netflix Co-Founder Reveals His Plan to Bring People to Cinemas

Movie theaters have been suffering lately, due to Netflix and easy availability of movies on the internet.

Mitch Lowe, an early Netflix Inc. executive, has come up with a solution for this problem. He is the CEO of a startup called MoviePass and has decided to fill the seats by allowing people to see movies the whole week in the price of the single ticket.

He plans to drop the company’s movie ticket subscription charges down to $9.95 on coming Tuesday.

This subscription will give customers access to any movie theater which accepts a debit card. MoviePass will pay the full price of each ticket to the cinema. This offer is not valid for 3D or IMAX screens.

What is MoviePass?

MoviePass was founded in 2011. The business works in the same way as a gym membership.

It is aimed at making profits from subscribers that pay $30 every month for the subscription and do not go to the theater enough to justify the money.

Mitch Lowe, the person who got Netflix off the ground and was president of the rental kiosk operator Redbox, became the CEO of MoviePass last year. According to Lowe the business plan of the company is still ‘years in the future’.

Short Term Future?

By introducing their new offer, the company was at risk of losing a lot of money so they decided to raise some cash by selling their majority stakes to Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc, which specialize in mass collection of data. This would not only help them in terms of customer experience but also aid them in target advertisement and marketing.

“It’s no different than Facebook or Google, the more we understand our fans, the more we can target them.” Said Ted Farnsworth the CEO at Helios and Matheson.

Rising Ticket Prices

The main reason why people avoid going to cinemas now is the higher prices of the tickets.

MoviePass aims at resolving the major reason for why the people are not visiting the cinemas. It is reducing the prices of the tickets so it can once again revive the cinema culture in people.

For a country like Pakistan, such a solution could work quite well as the attendance is only limited by the expensive tickets. A subscription could definitely work for the extroverts here.